The notorious Goodwin Sands lie about six miles off the coast of Deal. Historically nicknamed ‘the great ship swallower’, it is a dangerous ten-mile long sandbank where around 2,000 ships have been wrecked over the centuries.

Due to the dangers, the area was guarded by five lightships in the 19th century. Of these, the South Goodwin Lightvessel had a particularly turbulent history. It was bombed and sunk by the Germans in the Second World War and then, in 1954, its replacement suffered a terrible tragedy. On the night of 26th November, the cables to her two anchors broke in a hurricane-force storm and she was wrecked, killing seven of the eight people on board. The one survivor, who was rescued the next morning having clung to the rigging in raging seas for nine hours, had only been visiting the vessel to record bird migration.

The South Goodwin Lightship has now been replaced by a light buoy. In fact, until this week, the East Goodwin Lightship was the only remaining lightship of the five that once guarded the sands, all the others having been changed to light buoys over the years. She was such an iconic sight, and one that was easily visible from the meadows through binoculars. We got a closer look at her when we took a boat trip out to the Goodwins to have a walk on the sands back in 2024:

Below is a better photo of her, taken in Harwich in 2004, presumably when she was on her way out to the sands to replace an earlier model:

The safety of shipping and the well-being of seafarers have been the primary concerns of Trinity House since being incorporated by Royal Charter in 1514. Their two ships, the Patricia and the Galatea, are responsible for maintaining the navigational aids around the entire coastlines of England and Wales and the Channel Islands.

Because of the number of these navigational aids around the Goodwin Sands, one or other of these ships is often anchored overnight alongside the meadows. But it was completely unprecedented that both of them were here, as they were one night this week:

Later on that morning, we saw them working together further out to sea:

It was a couple of days after this that Dave was sitting at the top of the meadows with his birding scope, hoping to point the East Goodwin Lightship out to some visitors. He was very confused indeed when it seemed to have completely disappeared.

He researched this on returning inside and discovered that the East Goodwin Lightship had just been retired and towed back to Harwich by the Patricia. She has now been replaced by a light buoy which will be much easier to maintain. We presume that this happened on the day that both ships were working here together.

If there are any plans for what is now to happen to the East Goodwin Lightship, we cannot find any reference to them. A list of British Lightvessels on Wikipedia shows that some have become photographic studios, social spaces for yacht clubs, and floating art galleries and museums after they retired. Back in 2023 we stayed at Tollesbury in Essex where LV15 rests her old bones. She retired in the late 80s and was bought by the Fellowship Afloat Charitable Trust who provide outdoor activities for kids who sleep onboard the lightvessel, which must be very memorable for them.

Things change and technology marches on, but we will certainly miss that big, red lightship that was always there on duty out to sea.

This week the full-scale replica of the Nao Victoria sailed into Dover and we went to take a look at her. The Nao Victoria was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. It was one of five ships that left Seville in 1519 to try to find a good route to the spice islands, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. But after three years at sea, four of the ships had been lost and it was only the Nao Victoria that returned to Spain, having successfully sailed around the entire world.

A full scale replica of the ship was built in 1991 and, between 2004 and 2006, she repeated the journey of the original ship.

This summer she is visiting Dover for ten days and I have to say that she looked really small and such an odd sight moored up at the modern docks:

Whilst we were in Dover to see the Nao Victoria, we also went for a drink in one of Dover’s oldest pubs, The White Horse Inn, in a building which dates back to 1365:

But it wasn’t its great age that brought us there because it is famous for being the Channel swimmers’ pub. For decades, successful Channel swimmers have come to the pub after their swim to sign the walls and ceilings with their name and the date and timing of their swim.

You have to be in awe of Nora of Mexico who seems to have swum the Channel nine times, including a solo swim in 1994 when she swam from England to France and then back to England again in 23 hours 38 minutes:

I have driven past this pub so many times and now at last we have gone in.

The big news in the meadows is that we have finally had some rain! The drought eventually broke a week ago with some overnight rain and, in the refreshing cool of the next morning, I took this shocking photo from my bedroom window as a record of how dry the summer of 2026 has been:

Hopefully we will now start to see some green returning to this view.

With the breeding season over, John, the bird ringer, can once more play bird calls at his nets. The warblers are already on the move and he caught this young reed warbler in the meadows this week:

And he was cross not to have had his nets up when this pied flycatcher called in for a drink this week en route for Africa:

The blackbirds have started on the sloes:

And this is a rather spectacular photo of a magpie:

I am pleased that a barn owl has been hunting in the meadows most nights recently:

And the trail camera took this photo just at the moment that a stock dove lost a feather:

The two young swifts in the nest box attached to the house are continuing to grow well and spend a lot of their day peering out of the box to await the return of their parents:

It is funny to see the little family at night when the four of them attempt to cram themselves into the small feather nest:

It won’t be long now until they are gone.

My last photo for today is of a curious young fox who peered down at our daughter Lizzie and her partner through their kitchen roof-light in Walthamstow one morning:

I think it gave them quite a shock.

I would like to finish by dedicating this post to my aunt Rhona, whose funeral we went to this week in Cardiff. She was a wonderful lady who very much liked to travel the seas herself. She had a long and happy life and was a big supporter of this blog.

This week we returned for a few days to Curry Farm, a 65 acre private nature reserve near Bradwell-on-Sea on the Blackwater estuary in Essex:

Stephen Dewick and his wife Jean live at Curry farm today but it was Stephen’s late father who bought the farm back in 1932 and apples and then cereals were grown there until the early 1990s. Now, however, the land is totally given over to wildlife conservation. Stephen, like his father before him, has been extremely interested in macro moths his entire life and, incredibly, a moth trap has been run at Curry Farm on an almost nightly basis since 1946

But it is a moth trap like no other that I have seen before. It is apparently the largest moth trap in the country – a walk-in building with soil banked up around it to keep it cool and a 400 watt metal halide bulb shining on its roof to bring the moths in.

There is a funnel below the bulb into which the moths tumble, eventually ending up in the room below:

As it gets dark the next evening, the moths are allowed to escape for a couple of hours before the door is once more shut and the light on the roof goes back on as the next night’s mothing commences.

Stephen’s father, Bob Dewick, is famous in mothing circles because, in 1951, he discovered a species at Curry Farm that was new to Britain. The moth was given the common name Dewick’s plusia in his honour. After its discovery, the moth remained a very rare immigrant for many years, but has now started breeding in this country and numbers have increased significantly.

I had never seen a Dewick’s plusia before, but this week | saw four of them in the walk-in trap one morning. How very fitting to have seen my first Dewick’s plusia whilst standing next to a Dewick.

All the photos taken in the moth trap come out very orange because of the light in there, but here are two of the Dewick’s plusia moths that I saw this week:

Stephen catches far too many moths every day to count and report them all, so he only records rarities, interesting aberrations, first-sighting-of-the-years and migrant moths.

In this hot weather, he has already been getting lots of migrants. This is a bordered straw which doesn’t breed in this country:

And nor does the Vestal:

The eyed hawk-moth is not a migrant but I include it below because of the face, with eyes and long nose, that it flashes when threatened by a potential predator. This face been proven to deter insectivorous birds:

But, for me, the most astounding thing I saw in the trap was not a moth at all. The great silver water beetle, Hydrophilus piceus, is very large indeed, reaching a length of around 5cm. It is rare in the UK, only being found in a few places such as East Anglia and the Somerset levels. It lives in ponds and ditches but can fly to disperse and is attracted to light so does occasionally turn up in the Curry Farm moth trap:

We also saw lesser stag beetles out on the reserve, which was a new species for me as well:

On the underside of the stag beetle were some hitch-hiking mites which are harmless to the beetle and are simply clinging on so that they can be transported to new food sources:

The 65 acre reserve was looking as parched as our meadows are back home. Dave nearly trod on a large grass snake that was basking on one of the paths and apparently there are adders on the reserve as well:

We noticed quite a few wild plum trees that were dripping with ripe fruit at this time of year:

There was plenty of evidence that these plums were being eaten by the foxes:

Badgers will also be eating these plums as they drop to the ground, and we realised that this fruit must be a valuable food source for them in high summer when the ground is hard and worms are unavailable. On returning home I have immediately ordered three container-grown cherry plum trees to plant out in the meadows this coming autumn. Not only will the cherry plum be the first tree to flower each spring, providing energy-rich nectar for early bees and butterflies, they will also help to feed the badgers in late summer as they await the autumn rains.

We had a gentle few days in Essex in the high temperatures and with our elderly dog in tow, but we really enjoyed it and are planning on returning for a third visit next year.

Back in the meadows, winged ants have been taking to the air to disperse from the hundreds, if not thousands, of ant nests here. Large numbers of black-headed gulls arrive seemingly from nowhere and fly round and round trying to catch them. It is an annual spectacle that we look forward to:

The two swift chicks in the nest box attached to the side of the house are growing fast and I’m delighted to report that both parents are still in attendance:

The ringed kestrel has been a regular visitor to the meadows since 2019. Bringing up three chicks this year has taken its toll and she is definitely looking a bit ropey at the moment. But she has also now embarked on her annual moult, which will progress slowly so that she is still able to effectively hunt throughout. Before too long she should look smart once more:

She has her back to us here as she takes a cooling bath with the male:

And here is one of their young:

Many birds are now moulting following the hard work of the breeding season:

I’m pleased to see both badger cubs still going strong and are out with their mother here:

This week a badger dug a small latrine near the garden and very accurately deposited some dung in it:

They excavated a wasp nest one night to get at the combs full of protein-rich larvae. This is the best photo I got the next morning because there were still lots of very angry wasps buzzing around it and I decided not to get too close:

Over in the wood, another animal that likes to eat wasp larvae has returned to the same shallow pool:

Elsewhere in the wood a common buzzard arrives for a drink:

And I love this photo below of water cascading down from its beak:

Dave recently took this photo of two stock dove chicks that were being raised in the tawny owl nest box:

Five days later we met John, the bird ringer, at the wood so that he could ring them. It hadn’t been very long at all but they had developed so much:

The eclipse on Wednesday evening brought Dave and I out into the meadows wearing our wacky cardboard eclipse glasses:

I have now seen some fantastic images that some people managed to capture of the eclipse, and my best effort below definitely isn’t one of these. However, it is a record shot of a very memorable event

But there was a second significant event in the meadows this week when the partner of our youngest child, Lizzie, told us he wanted to have a picnic in the meadows at which he planned to propose to her. Dave and I did what we could to prepare a magical space for them, setting up the picnic at the top of the meadows with views over the Channel and across to the white cliffs of France:

There was a slight hiccup when he got down on one knee and presented her with a small box that unexpectedly turned out to be completely empty of a ring, and for this he will forever be teased. However, she said yes regardless.

We are now looking forward to a family wedding in 2027.

There was a very interesting visitor to the wood this week:

This is a male honey buzzard, birds with a specialist diet that mainly eat the protein-rich larvae of wasps, bees and hornets. They sit quietly and watch the flight patterns of the insects in order to locate their nests. Once found, they then tear the nest open with their powerful claws to access the combs of larvae. They have several evolutionary adaptations to help them cope with being stung, such as the feathers on their heads which are short and stiff and arranged like fish scales.

It is thought that there are only 130 to 150 pairs of these birds nesting in Britain and this is a shame because they are the only natural predator we have for the invasive Asian hornets that have recently arrived in this country.

As a rare breeding bird in the UK, the location of honey buzzard nests are usually swathed in great secrecy for the birds’ protection. However there was a honey buzzard nest in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex, featured on this year’s Springwatch television programme back in May. As of 3rd August, the live footage of this nest with two chicks is still being broadcast and can be viewed at ashdownforest.org/honey-buzzard-livecam/ although the chicks do now look close to fledging and will surely soon be gone. It is the first ever live streaming of a honey buzzard nest in the UK and I hope that it is being watched closely by experts and that much is being learned.

This week I have been regularly checking in wth the nest to see what is going on. Below the two chicks have just been given a large piece of honeycomb by their mother, out of which they were extracting the wasp larvae:

It is mostly honeycomb that is coming in to the nest, but in this next photo the adult male on the right has delivered a bird chick that he delicately pulled small bits off to feed to his chicks:

Blean Woods is a large area of remote woodland around Canterbury and I am now speculating that perhaps the honey buzzard seen in our wood this week has a nest somewhere there.

But the honey buzzard was not the only new species spotted in the wood. Two botanical experts were doing a survey there recently and found a broad-leaved helleborine in a clearing:

We went to where the botanists had spotted the plant and managed to find six more as well. Most of them were now bearing seed pods, indicating that they have already flowered and that those flowers were pollinated. There has been research to suggest that the flowers of this helleborine mimic the smell of green leaves that are being attacked by caterpillars. The common wasp and the German wasp are drawn to the plant, hoping to predate the non-existent caterpillars, and end up pollinating its flowers whilst they are there.

Although the flowers are greenish and somewhat inconspicuous, we are sorry to have missed them and hope that these plants will return next year.

The third and final new species to be spotted in the wood this week was crawling around on a woodpile:

This very large caterpillar grows up to 6.5cm. I put my hand in front of the caterpillar so that it crawled over it, which gives it some perspective:

This caterpillar will pupate in loose soil or leaf litter underneath the lime tree and this is how it will spend the winter. In the spring it will emerge as an adult, which also looks pretty wonderful:

This spring four tawny owl chicks were raised in a tawny owl nest box attached to a large beech tree at the edge of a clearing. John, the bird ringer, ringed them on 6th May and they all fledged a week later:

The owls had previously nested in the box in 2022 and fledged two young. But where were they nesting in the intervening years? Tawnies are generally faithful to a nest site, but perhaps ours are having to rotate between several sites within their territory because of competition with squirrels? Once a tawny owl has selected a nest site, they are able to defend it but, if the squirrels get to the box first and fill it with twigs and leaves, the box becomes unusable by the owls. Squirrels certainly did nest in the box in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Dave has decided to make a new tawny owl box along the lines of this successful one, and place it at the edge of a newly-created clearing elsewhere in the wood. We hope that this will increase the options for the owls.

While he was up at the box, he had a quick look in and found two stock dove chicks:

We have arranged to meet John at the wood in a few days for him to ring these chicks.

In this continued hot and dry weather the owls have been coming to the ponds every day and it’s so lovely to see them:

Over in the meadows, I was pleased to see this photo of both badger cubs together because I was worrying about how they were getting on in this drought:

And it’s always interesting to get an insight into what the foxes are eating. This is some kind of largish bird:

Whilst this is a rabbit:

This perch alongside the hedgerow is the only one that I ever see sparrowhawks using. They don’t like perching out in the open:

All continues well in the swift box attached to the side of the house. There are still two adults in attendance and the chicks are growing fast:

Last year we found 149 wasp spiders out in the meadows. So far this year we have only found one:

While I was out looking for wasp spiders, I did find this different species which was less than half the size but did also have a lot of yellow on her.

The clouded yellow butterfly is an immigrant to the UK and many more arrive some years than others. We hadn’t seen one at all in the meadows since 2023 but have been happy to see several here this year:

Our son Jonny and his wife are still in Madagascar and continue to send us photos of the sometimes wacky wildlife that they are seeing. This nymph of the flatid leaf bug, Phromnia rosea, is endemic to the tropical dry forests of Madagascar and looks really quite extraordinary:

The adult bugs have wide pink wings which they hold in a tent like fashion, concealing the body. Thus, when they group together, they could well be mistaken for a flower spike:

What a fantastic wildlife experience they are having out there. Look closely, though, and British wildlife can be pretty amazing too.

It has been tremendously dry this summer and most things here have turned yellow. The Agapanthus, sitting at the threshold between the garden and the meadows, is a notable exception. A native of South Africa, it takes this sort of thing in its stride:

The wild pond totally dried up whilst we were on holiday and we weren’t here to take the extreme decision to top it up with tap water. This pond was dug in 2016 and had not dried out completely before:

The hard, dry ground makes life terribly difficult for badgers, for whom worms would ordinarily be 70% of their diet. This photo was taken just as we were leaving for the Outer Hebrides when the grass was still green, but I’m pleased to report that these four adult badgers and at least one of the cubs are still alive:

It was very busy along Walmer seafront last week as the Downs Sailing Club hosted the National Schools Sailing Regatta for the first time in twelve years. How lovely to see the waters in front of the meadows so alive with young people enjoying this wholesome activity:

As we were admiring all the dinghies one morning, ten small planes flew over our heads in formation. It was the Swiss Airforce aerial display team flying their Pilatus PC-7 aircraft up to an airshow at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire:

I am pleased to see that, even in this prolonged dry weather when worms and other soil-dwelling invertebrates must be so hard to come by, blackbird chicks are still successfully fledging:

Song thrushes have learned to switch to snails when worms are not available:

Just below the gate is a snail graveyard with hundreds of shells:

A wren has taken to spreading all its feathers out and sunbathing on this perch:

And a great spotted woodpecker is an unusual sight here in the meadows:

We are no longer seeing the complete kestrel family that had previously been hanging out on our roof, although one or two of them are still calling by:

The ringed female is looking a bit tatty after all the hard work of bringing up her family:

It’s always exciting to see owls in the meadows:

This year two pairs of swifts nested in the swift boxes attached to the side of the house. One of these pairs built a nest but then didn’t lay any eggs, and they have now already left on their migration back to Africa. Hopefully they will return next year to breed.

For a long time it looked like the other pair were also not going to lay any eggs but they finally did, a month later than in the previous two years. There are now two feathered chicks in the box doing well:

The many great green bush-crickets that live amongst the meadow grasses are a tasty snack for the birds:

When I run the moth trap, I try to get to it the next morning whilst it is still dark and before the birds get up. Any moths that haven’t quite made it into the shelter of the trap are vulnerable to being picked off by magpies once it gets light and I feel responsible for their safety. This week I got up at 3am and went out to the trap to turn off the light and pot up any exposed moths.

I was shocked to see a forlorn collection of wings already scattered around in the base of the trap and a great green bush-cricket sitting at the entrance, grabbing moths as they arrived. I managed to catch her and get her into a large jar:

Later the same morning I released her back into the meadows and took a better photo before she jumped away:

The hummingbird hawk-moth is mainly an immigrant to this country from southern Europe and north Africa, although for several years now some have also been surviving our winters and breeding in southern England:

On the other hand, it is far from normal to see clearwing moths. Even though there are probably quite a lot of them around, they manage to keep themselves well under the human radar. This week I put pheromone lures out and caught two additional clearwing moth species. The six-belted clearwing was caught in the meadows amongst birds-foot trefoil, one of its larval foodplants:

And two red-belted clearwing were caught close to a hawthorn tree in the wood:

I have now seen six of the fourteen clearwing species resident in the British Isles. The others that I have spotted, clockwise from top left, are the orange-tailed clearwing, currant clearwing, red-tipped clearwing and the fiery clearwing:

What wonderful things they are.

I feel that hoverflies are generally underappreciated and ill-understood by many people, myself included. As well as the adults being excellent pollinators, the larvae of around 40% of British species are gardeners’ friends, being important predators of aphids.

There has been recent evidence that hoverflies are in steep decline across Great Britain and, given their significance in the ecosystem, I find it amazing that the larvae of only about two thirds of UK hoverfly species have even been described, let alone their lifecycle properly understood.

There are around 280 species of hoverfly in the UK. The larvae of about 20% of these are aquatic or semi-aquatic, living in shallow water, mud or tree rot holes. Another 40% are predatory, eating aphids and other small terrestrial invertebrates. The final 40% of hoverfly larvae live in decaying wood, plant roots, dung or within wasp, bee or ant nests. It feels important to fully get to grips with these lifecycles in order to know how best to conserve them.

I have been admiring two different species of hoverfly this week. This first one is a bit of a corker:

More is known about life cycle of this second hoverfly. It is the great pied hoverfly, Volucella pellucens, which always reminds me of Humpty Dumpty. The adult female lays her eggs in social wasp nests and the hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest.

What is not fully comprehended, though, is how the female hoverfly can successfully sneak undetected into the well-guarded wasp nest.

Over in the wood, the large marjoram clearing has come into glorious flower:

The blossoming marjoram is heaving with invertebrates including many species of butterfly. The silver-washed fritillary is the most magnificent of them all and photos really don’t do them justice. We saw several of these this week:

June’s tour around the dormouse boxes ended up not happening because the only day that we could do was one of the amber heat warning days which would have been madness. So this week we set off on the July tour, with the boxes not having been opened for two months. We had Lottie and Gemma with us, both of whom hope to get their dormouse disturbance licences soon, but need some more experience handling dormice first.

Unfortunately, although we had found eleven dormice on May’s tour, this time we only found three. We speculated that it has been too hot in the boxes and the dormice are making wild nests in more airy places.

The lid of box 29 was firmly stuck down and Dave ended up having to lever it off with a knife. We were all surprised with what we found in there:

My notes from the May tour told me that angry buzzing had been coming from this box and we had wisely decided not to open it. That must have been a tree bumblebee nest because now in the box in July is the nest of the wax moth, Aphomia sociella, whose caterpillars consume the wax, pollen and bee larvae of tree bumblebees. All very interesting.

Other photos from the wood this week:

I finish today with some wildlife sightings from our children. Jonty found a leafcutter bee struggling with an enormous piece of leaf in his greenhouse in Maidenhead. The bee will be using the leaf to make a series of chambers within a tunnel. As she completes each leaf-lined chamber she will stock it with a pile of pollen and lay an egg on it. The resulting larva will live off the pollen that its mother provided for it.

Our other son Jonny and his wife Hayley have been in Madagascar this week and have been sending us photos of many different lemur species and all sorts of other bizarre but wonderful things. This comet moth, Argema mittrei, is gigantic and is endemic to the Madagascan rainforests. The males have a wingspan of 20cm making it one of the largest moths in the World. Here is one clinging to its pupal cocoon:

But the photo below is the most extraordinary of them all to my mind:

It appears to just be a photo of some branches, yet lying along the length of the central branch is a leaf gecko, its head pointing downwards, and with its tail towards the top of the photo. Apparently their nature guide spotted this animal from about five metres away. How amazing is that!

This week we escaped the heat and have been enjoying the much cooler climate of the Outer Hebrides.

The archipelago has nineteen inhabited islands but we spent the week investigating the wildlife on just five of them that are linked together by causeways: Berneray, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist and Eriskay:

The western margins of the islands are covered in glorious machair, low lying coastal grassland growing on windblown shell sand. It is one of the rarest habitats in Europe, famous for its plant variety and vitally important for bird populations.

The 2022 population census recorded just 1,574 permanent residents on North Uist. Only 300 of these live in the capital, Lochmaddy, and the rest are spread out across the island in extremely low density:

Every day of the holiday we visited wonderful beaches that we mostly had entirely to ourselves:

The Outer Hebrides are almost entirely off the main gas grid and rely heavily on tankered oil, and so peat remains an important supplementary fuel to reduce heating costs for the households. However, the tradition of peat cutting is slowly declining as the generation that knows how to cut and stack peat passes on. Additionally, since peatlands sequester carbon, strict regulations are now in place in an attempt to ensure sustainable harvesting:

There were very few hotels and restaurants on the islands. The food shops were nearly all smallish Co-ops, although these were quite well stocked with fruit and vegetables. Not always though:

Over a hundred and ten traditional shielings remain on North Uist, with their thatched roofs held down with boulders:

But these days the home below is much more representative of the sort of place where people live:

Although some things do still need to be held down with rocks:

On the first morning of our stay we were booked onto a boat trip from Kallin Harbour, taking us out into the waters around the uninhabited island of Ronay. We saw at least six white-tailed sea eagles:

The eagles have learnt that it is often worth their while following fishing boats, as well as wildlife boats such as ours, where a single fish was inflated with air and put into the water:

A white-tailed eagle is often referred to as a ‘flying barn door’:

We also saw several golden eagles on the boat trip. The breeding female golden eagle on this territory was lost last year but a new female has now arrived. They didn’t nest this year but there are great hopes that they will breed next year.

The rest of the week was spent travelling around the islands in the minibus seeing what wildlife we could find.

We also saw hen harriers every day. This female was just about to catch a vole:

Red throated, black throated and great northern divers were seen over the course of the week:

By the end of the week we had ninety species on our bird list which is not an enormous total but there were some very good things on it! For the first time ever Dave and I heard corncrakes singing, as they start their second broods, which is something we had always wanted to do.

It wasn’t just birds that we saw:

On one of the beaches several species of jellyfish had washed up. Blue, compass and moon jellyfish here:

I was delighted with my first ever sighting of a large heath butterfly. This is the virtually spotless scotica race of the butterfly which is only found in northern Scotland

I had also never seen this moth before. It’s a true lovers knot, a heathland specialist with its larvae feeding on heathers:

This common hawker was a new species of dragonfly for me:

The islands are a stronghold for rare bumblebees including the great yellow bumblebee and the moss carder bee that feed on the flower-rich machair:

On our last day we were driving to a beach but had to abandon the minibus because the track was flooded:

We continued of foot but when we crested the dunes to look down onto the beach, we found to our surprise that we were not alone:

The Highland cattle were milling around enjoying themselves in the shallows and on the sand.

It was a wonderfully atmospheric sight and we sat for ages watching them all in the sunshine. It will remain in our memories as one of the highlights of the trip.

The last stop to finish up our final day was at the ancient stone circle overlooking Langass Loch – a very photogenic spot indeed:

At 6am the next morning we left our hotel and began our long journey home, this time travelling on the Caledonian overnight sleeper train down from Inverness, arriving shattered but happy towards lunchtime the next day. We might only be a small nation, but the Outer Hebrides to the east coast of Kent still seemed a very long way indeed.

We had always hoped to one day be able to experience what life is like in the remote Outer Hebrides. We probably saw them at their best this week, when they were in flower and in such lovely weather, and we were delighted to have finally got ourselves there.

On a warm, still summer’s evening this week we went on a trip up the Stour to see if we could spot any of the two hundred beavers that are now thought to be living on the fifteen miles of river between Canterbury and Sandwich.

We started at 8pm alongside the Grove Ferry Inn at point A on the map below and travelled south-west where the lovely river has Stodmarsh nature reserve to the south and the railway line running alongside it to the north:

At point B, the tidal influence stopped and the waters became beautifully clear thereafter. We turned around at point C and headed back to Grove Ferry, arriving back in the dark around 10.30pm

The beavers don’t attempt to dam the river but instead live in lodges and burrows along its banks and have also expanded out into the marshy Stodmarsh reserve. We passed four or five beaver lodges as we progressed up the river:

The animals would much rather swim than travel by foot, so they dig canals along their favoured routes away from the river. This is an entrance to one of these canals which apparently stretches for 15 metres:

There is concern about what this concentration of beavers, with all their burrow and canal building, will have on the integrity of the river banks and railway embankment, so cameras have been placed at strategic points to monitor their activity:

We did see around twelve beavers over the course of the trip, although mostly as the light was fading fast and photography was difficult. The best sighting was at the point where we turned the boat around. A willow had fallen into the water there and three or four beavers were out working to strip its bark:

In the photo below a beaver is facing us, just below the slanting trunk and I like its large, black nose:

It is so very wonderful to see wild beavers flourishing in Britain once more after they were hunted to extinction in the 16th century. So much more is now understood about the role this species can play in protecting the country against flooding and increasing our depleted biodiversity, and I hope that the sheer number of the animals living on the Stour doesn’t create problems and earn them a bad reputation.

The ringed female kestrel, who has been with us here for the last seven years, has been bringing her three offspring up to the meadows every day recently. We know when they have arrived because they make quite a racket that is impossible to miss. The young birds are often parked in a Scots pine close to the house:

Or they are to be found hanging out amongst the chimney pots:

Unfortunately, up to 70% of kestrels die in their first year, many starving because of their inexperience in hunting for their food, so I hope these young birds are paying attention to what their mother is now teaching them.

It is the first time that we have been treated to views of a family group of kestrels here.

I have some giants to show you this week. The first is the privet hawk-month, a monster with a wingspan of up to 12cm:

The second giant is a loud and aggressive horsefly that I found in the kitchen. Because we have no livestock or deer nearby, sightings of horseflies are mercifully rare. This Tabanus species was about 2cm long, though, and I was very pleased to remove it from the house:

Whilst the horsefly would happily bite humans, the hornet-mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, in the next photo, poses no threat to us despite being a scary 2cm long. It lays its eggs in wasp nests and its larvae feed mainly on the detritus at the bottom of the nest:

This photo below, taken in the meadows in August 2018, shows a wasp nest that had been torn open by badgers overnight, leaving everything in disarray. However, a Volucella zonaria has arrived and can be seen inspecting the carnage to see if it presented an opportunity for her to lay her eggs:

My final monster for today is a violet carpenter bee that our daughter Lizzie saw in Provence, where she is staying in a chateau with a lovely garden this weekend to attend a wedding:

These bees can apparently be up to 3cm long, which is enormous for a bee, and have a jet black body with amazing iridescent violet-blue wings. Although it is primarily a southern European species, it has now arrived in England and was first spotted breeding here in 2007. It remains very rare here, though, and I have certainly never seen one. They bore into soft, decaying, untreated wood to make their nest and then provision it with pollen collected from flowering plants.

The running of the moth trap is quite an undertaking at this time of year because the catches are so large, and I’m so slow working my way through them. Nevertheless, I am trying to get round to it once a week as I attempt to build up a comprehensive moth list for the meadows. The meadow moth list, only started last year, currently stands at 220 macro moth species and 97 micro moths.

The Sussex emerald is a highly restricted, endangered moth in the UK but the area of shingle below the meadows is one of the places that it does still breed and I feel privileged to get them in the moth trap each year:

The bright wave is another threatened and red data book species that breeds on the vegetated shingle below us, and I catch this moth too at this time of year:

The small blue is the UK’s smallest butterfly and we are lucky to have a colony of them here. This species is highly localised and scarce, mainly because they rely on only one plant, the kidney vetch, to feed their caterpillars. It also doesn’t help, of course, that kidney vetch is only a short-lived perennial. By this time of year, the first brood of adults, flying from mid-May to mid-June, have laid their eggs and these have now developed into caterpillars living within the fading flowers. When I went out looking for small blue caterpillars this week, it didn’t take me very long to find some:

The beginning of July is when ragwort starts announcing itself by coming into flower, and we start remorselessly pulling it up. This huge ragwort plant was hiding in plain sight in the reptile area:

We don’t feel bad about removing ragwort, even though it is good for pollinators, because there is vast amount of it growing locally. It is classified as an injurious weed in the Weeds Act of 1959 and causes irreversible liver damage in grazing animals. Our cut grasses no longer go to make hay but we just don’t want it here anyway, because it is highly vigorous and doesn’t stay in balance with the rest of the plants in the meadow community. If, however, there are cinnabar moth caterpillars on the plant, then we leave it alone, returning later to pull it once the caterpillars have safely pupated into the ground below the plant:

We spent a morning this week in the wood with John the bird ringer, who is progressing the breeding bird survey that he has been carrying out in the wood this spring for the British Trust for Ornithology. A fortnight previously he had checked the raptor boxes and found a stock dove nest with eggs in one of the tawny boxes:

A stock dove had flown from the box as we were putting the ladder up and inside there were two warm eggs, along with a third one that wasn’t being incubated:

We returned this week in the hope that there were now chicks in the box that were the right size for ringing. At this stage the chicks bear little relation to the adult birds that they will grow up to be:

What an extraordinary beak they have. It is broad and black, still with the grey egg tooth at the tip. This egg tooth is a temporary, sharp projection on the upper bill which is used to puncture the inner air cell of the egg for the chick’s initial breaths, and then used to break open the eggshell from the inside.

The beak of an adult bird looks very different indeed:

Both chicks were very well fed and had large, prominent crops that were full of the crop milk being fed to them by both of their parents. The crop milk is highly nutritious but also very liquid and John had to be very careful that the young birds stayed the right way up as he got them down from the box to ring. This is because there is a risk of them drowning in the crop milk should they turn upside down.

He also looked in the tawny nest box that four tawny owl chicks had fledged from back in May. The trail camera looking at the box showed that stock doves had moved in almost as soon as the owls moved out:

When John got the tawny owl chicks out of the box to ring them shortly before they fledged, he took a photo of the floor of the box. We had completely cleaned it out over the winter, but the owls had made quite a mess:

He took another photo of the inside of the box this week:

The stock doves have clearly been busy bringing in lots of twigs and I expect that they will lay some eggs shortly.

Other photos from the wood this week:

This weekend an inspirational home in Deal held its annual open day to mark Swift Awareness Week:

This semi-detached house has 28 swift boxes under the eaves of the roof and, this year, will potentially have thirty chicks fledging from the colony:

There is much to be enjoyed about this plan of the boxes. Interestingly, the boxes facing north-east are by far the least popular with numbers 11 to 18 currently sitting empty. Our boxes here in the meadows all face north, other than one that looks east, and we had thought that this is the recommended aspect so that the boxes don’t get too hot – but this throws that advice into doubt.

New this year is box 19 which is above the conservatory and difficult to access. Therefore the owner, Dan, drilled out from the loft space and the box behind this entrance hole sits in the attic. He said, however, that he had been planning to put three of these in but it proved so difficult to install that there is only one so far. There are already swifts breeding in this box, though, so the concept is good.

We enjoyed seeing a lot of swift comings and goings while we stood in the garden:

It was great to catch up with what is going on in Dan’s swift colony and I got a chance to ask him about our swift pair here, where an egg wasn’t laid until 22nd June, a month later than in the previous two years. He reassuringly told us that his latest egg ever was laid on 21st September and that all ended successfully with the birds setting off on their migration at the very end of October.

So my final photo for today is of the inside of our swift box here where incubation is doggedly continuing:

Hatching is expected on 12th to 15th July.

It has been an extraordinary week because I have managed to tick off two items that have been languishing on my wildlife bucket list for quite some time. During the extreme temperatures of last weekend we stayed at Warren Cottage in the middle of the Tiger Hill nature reserve in rural Suffolk near Sudbury:

Dr Grace Griffiths started renting this charming cottage with her family in 1927 and, when it came up for sale in 1938, she bought it along with several acres of woodland. She was an amazing, selfless woman who absolutely loved this place, and was also a dedicated naturalist, fighting for it to become a protected space for nature after her death. The Griffiths Trust and others now care for the land which has become part of the wider 54 acre Tiger Hill local nature reserve.

We were only staying there three nights and were a bit scuppered by the oppressive temperatures of the heat wave, making us want to hide inside in front of a fan. However, ten species of bat have been recorded on the reserve and, at 10pm when it wasn’t really much cooler but at least there was no blasting sun, we ventured out with our bat detectors.

There are so many lovely mature trees on the reserve, many of which are liberally adorned with bat boxes:

After spending some time out with the bats, we returned to the cottage lawn…

And this was the momentous point that I ticked off an item on my wildlife wish list:

We found seven small but intense green lights shining out from around the edges of the lawn. Using a torch and my camera flash, it was possible to photograph the female glow-worm, Lampyris noctiluca, whilst she was shining her light to bring in a male:

Already there was a male in the grass below her:

Before very long at all, the male had found the female and he was masking her light with his body which perhaps stops other males from arriving:

Another female that we photographed, though, had attracted far too many males and I wonder how that situation sorted itself out:

Once I had got my eye in for what a male glow-worm looked like, I noticed that they were also being lured into the house when the lights were on at night and then dying on the window sills. I was not too late to save this one:

I have twice found a glow-worm larva in our wood back in Kent and presume that there must be a population there, although we have never visited as it gets dark to see the adult females’ bioluminescence.

With flightless females, dispersal is always going to be a challenge. The female larvae travel across the ground just before they pupate but colonies still tend to become highly isolated, struggling to expand across inhospitable landscape. Males are also confused by artificial light and this is another reason that probably contributes to why the UK glow-worm population has been declining for many years.

I have reported these glow-worm sightings on iRecord and already heard back from the expert that they had one previous record for glow-worms at the cottage dating from1974, and that he was really pleased that they were still there! We are now enthused to further investigate the glow-worm population in the marjoram clearing in our wood. Glow-worms are apparently also to be found in unimproved chalk downloads and old hedgerows so maybe we might also find them in the meadows if we take the time to properly look.

We were in this part of Suffolk last weekend for a very particular reason. Kentwell Hall in Long Melford has been holding immersive historical Tudor reenactments for the past 48 years. Our son Jonty and his wife Ellie were part of this year’s living history experience, along with over two hundred other volunteers.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to Kentwell. The volunteers had all made their own costumes and wonderfully stayed in character throughout the day.

After several days of sweltering in the extraordinary temperatures and camping onsite in a tent throughout the hot nights, Jonty said that he was very envious of the Kentwell pigs wallowing around in the mud:

When we were wandering around the moat, a brown hawker dragonfly landed on my sandal. This is the first time I’ve seen this species but it wasn’t around for long enough to get a really good look:

By Sunday the temperatures had returned to a more tolerable level and we went for a walk in the Arger Fen and Spouse’s Vale reserve that lies next to the Tiger Hill reserve where we were staying.

These days I cannot walk past a sight such as this without stopping to see whose nests these are in the sandy ground:

We didn’t have to wait long:

It was a colony of ornate-tailed digger wasps. These solitary wasps frequently nest together like this and hunt small and medium-sized bees. The bees are paralysed by stinging and are then brought back to the nest to feed the wasp larvae

We saw plenty of butterflies at Arger Fen. A pair of ringlets here…

…but we saw the magnificent white admiral and silver-washed fritillary as well, and also purple hairstreak through our binoculars high up in the canopy of the oaks. I didn’t get a photo of the purple hairstreaks at Arger Fen, but I did see one on the lawn at our cottage just as I was sitting on a picnic bench with a glass of wine:

I very much like the idea of combining wildlife spotting with drinking wine, but even I have to admit this isn’t a great photo. Here is a better one from Wiki Commons:

But it wasn’t just glow worms that have been ticked off my bucket list this week. A few days earlier I was sitting in the garden going through the moth trap when I got a phone call from another member of the Walmer Castle wildlife team. She knew that I really, really wanted to see a fiery clearwing moth and she and her husband had just seen one on the beach in front of the castle. I ensured that the moths in the trap were safe, jumped in the car and drove. The fiery clearwing is a red data book species that is fully protected by law against disturbance, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t quietly observe them going about their business. The females lay their eggs on curled dock plants at the top of the shingle beach between Walmer and Kingsdown.

A week or so previously we had been down on the beach in front of the castle photographing tiny fiery clearwing eggs that had been laid at the base of a curled dock leaf:

I am really pleased to now be able to remove the fiery clearwing from the bucket list.

A couple of weeks prior to this I had set some clearwing pheromone lures in the meadows and was delighted to catch both an orange-tailed clearwing and a currant clearwing. I subsequently put the lures out twice more without seeing a further clearwing. This week, however, I caught five orange-tailed clearwings within ten minutes of setting the traps:

They are amazing-looking things and I like their shaggy knees:

A few other interesting photos from this week:

I might have successfully ticked two items off my nature bucket list this week, but there is still plenty on there to be getting on with. Some, such as watching grizzly bears plucking salmon from Canadian rivers, I will never now achieve since we no longer fly. But there are others, like seeing basking sharks cruising through the water with their mouths wide open, that I do still hope to experience one day. I will certainly do my best to make them happen.

We have been busy with several sets of visitors recently, getting out and about to show them how packed East Kent is with interesting history and wildlife. One day we caught the Go2Sea ex-special forces rib out of Ramsgate harbour to see the seals that lounge around at the mouth of the River Stour.

There were lots of unusual vessels in Ramsgate harbour. These two below carry pilots out to large ships to help them navigate into the Thames:

There were also five or six of these UK Border Force vessels moored there, used to intercept small boats carrying migrants across The Channel:

It was lovely to see so many harbour seals resting up at the mouth of the river:

They stay still and look very sweet, so are definitely a photographer’s friend:

The land to both the north and the south of the river entrance is all nature reserve and there were plenty of birds to see too. A little egret strolls past one of the seals:

And a marsh harrier hunts above them:

A pair of shelduck stand watch over their little family:

On another day we visited Elmley nature reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. The view from the Well Marsh hide, over what is usually a lake, tells you all you need to know about how dry it has been so far this summer:

Black-headed gull chicks finding themselves something to drink:

Nevertheless, we saw a pleasing forty-three species of birds, a list that contained marsh harrier, bearded reedlings, corn bunting, cuckoos, avocets with chicks and yellow wagtails:

On another day we went to Goodnestone Park where Jane Austen’s brother once lived and where she often visited:

Martin found some noteworthy invertebrates while he was here in Kent:

The beach at Walmer and Kingsdown is looking really rather lovely at the moment

We have also had our daughter Sarah and her family up from Cornwall to stay. Our young grandson very much enjoyed rockpooling on the beach at low tide in Kingsdown…

…and he was of course introduced to the wonders of mothing while he was here:

Other interesting things that we have seen this week:

We met John the bird ringer in the wood and he checked the six raptor boxes that we have up there – two barn owl boxes, three tawny owl boxes and a kestrel box.

Along with evidence of squirrels using two of the boxes, we think that three of the boxes currently have stock doves nesting. Indeed, a stock dove flew out of this tawny box as we were putting up the ladder:

Inside were two warm eggs and a third egg partially buried under twigs which is presumably no longer viable:

Stock doves moved into another of the tawny boxes more or less as soon as the young owls fledged on 11th May:

John also noticed a songthrush nest in a tree and ringed the four chicks in it. They were apparently the perfect size for ringing:

The green woodpecker chicks have now fledged from their hole in the old cherry tree, but the camera is in disgrace since it failed to capture any of the departures:

Great spotted woodpeckers have also fledged elsewhere in the woods and the juveniles are frequently appearing on the cameras:

As I write, we are suffering another scorching spell of weather – this time with amber warnings of extreme heat. But there has been some recent rain and we are extremely grateful for the recharging of the ponds and water butts:

The meadows slope gently downwards, overlooking the North Sea to the east, and it is therefore a place of sunrises rather than sunsets. Nevertheless I finish this week with a beautiful sunset that I was recently treated to when I went out at dusk to give the badgers their peanuts:

What a wonderful sight.

Last Christmas my brother bought me a set of the ‘Big 6’ clearwing moth pheromone lures. Clearwing moths are an elusive and scarce group of day-flying moths that aren’t drawn to the light of a moth trap and stay very much under the human radar. But, in the last twenty years or so, synthetic pheromone lures have been developed to attract them and this has been transforming our understanding of their population sizes and distribution.

Dave and | had only ever come across one of these clearwing moths before. It was a red-tipped clearwing, seen back in 2018 at the Wheatfen Broad reserve in Norfolk:

I was totally mesmerised by the exotic-looking little thing. But this was on an amazing nature reserve in Norfolk and could I really dare to hope that there were also clearwings flying here in the meadows in Kent? We had certainly never seen one.

This week I took the lures out of the freezer where they need to be kept:

After doing some research into flight seasons and larval food plants, I decided to give the orange-tailed, yellow-legged and currant clearwing lures a go as a test run this week.

The Christmas present also included three specialised traps to hold the pheromone lures. The orange-tailed clearwing lays her eggs mainly on wayfarer trees and in the past decade we have planted many of these here in the meadows. I hung the first trap next to a small copse of mixed wayfarer and guelder rose bushes:

The yellow-legged clearwing, however, likes oaks – mainly pedunculate but also other oaks including holm oaks. So the second trap hung in a pedunculate oak tree which is also right next to a holm oak:

The placement of the third trap was easy because the currant clearwing lays her eggs on blackcurrants and we have several of these busily producing fruit for summer puddings in the allotment:

I really wasn’t expecting anything to come of this test run, and so I was actually jumping with excitement when we inspected the traps a short while later and found a clearwing in one of them:

It was in the trap hanging in the oak tree that contained the lure for yellow-legged clearwings. It was therefore a bit of a surprise to find that this was not a yellow-legged clearwing at all, but was in fact an orange-tailed clearwing. What a thing of beauty it is – the orange tail at the end of a narrow abdomen is quite extraordinary

Once I had photographed the moth, I released it in the same place and brought that trap in so that I didn’t catch it again. We continued to check the other traps and were delighted to also get a currant clearwing in the trap near the blackcurrants:

After the unexpected success of the clearwing test run, I have done additional research and now know a lot more about clearwings and how to most effectively lure them with the pheromones. I wonder if we will manage to see any more species before the end of the summer?

The addition of the two clearwing species to the meadows moth list is indisputably one of my wildlife highlights of the year. Another high point, though, has been the successful treatment of a pair of foxes with mange using arsen sulphur. These two foxes have cubs this spring which made it especially important to get them better. In an earlier post I included before and after photos showing how the male’s fur was growing back:

I have now had a chance to get a better look at the vixen. Here she was in late March just as I was starting the six-week course:

Now, with a big sigh of relief, I can include a photo from this week to show how much better she is, with fur reappearing where it had been lost:

The treatment was made much easier by the fact that the two of them were model patients, turning up every evening without fail for their sandwiches sprinkled with the arsen sulphur that I was serving with the peanuts at dusk.

There has not been much rain this spring and early summer, and earthworms have been difficult to get at. Consequently the badgers too have been extremely interested in the nightly peanuts and are often waiting for me out in the open. Never before have I been able to photograph them as easily as this:

This is the mother of the cubs as you can tell by her tummy:

And here she is again, out with her cubs at night on a trail camera:

The song thrushes would ideally also be collecting worms at the moment and no doubt they have a nest full of hungry mouths to feed. But, in dry periods when the ground is hard, they have an alternative food source to keep their family fed:

Back in the meadows we haven’t seen much of the kestrels so far this year but this one has caught herself a lizard:

And it has been a long while since a barn owl was last seen here:

Several pairs of starlings have been nesting in the meadows this spring, and the young from their first broods have now fledged:

Adult starlings feed their chicks a protein-rich diet of invertebrates. But, since earthworms have been hard to come by, this will have comprised of beetles, caterpillars, spiders and other such grubs. I was also surprised at how many photos I have had this week of starlings with butterflies or moths in their beaks:

The four butterfly banks in the meadows are at their most fabulous in June:

One of them is heavily covered in kidney vetch this year, a plant that is adored by many species of butterfly:

Sainfoin is a beautiful plant with a beautiful name, and is a complete bee magnet:

And a few pyramidal orchids have now arrived in the meadows:

I ran the moth trap in the wood one night this week and got a big haul of moths, adding nearly forty species to the wood moth list. I think this scorched wing moth was my favourite:

One of the many joys of mothing is exploring the imaginative English names given to the moths by entomologists from earlier centuries. Clockwise from top left we have clouded border, green oak tortrix, fern, pretty chalk carpet, mocha and satin lutestring:

The wider wood has a population of buzzards and, although they don’t nest in our wood, they are often to be seen there, especially using the water in the summer. A buzzard arrived to find this shallow dish unfortunately dry…

…but there is always water available in the deeper pools for these magnificent birds:

It appears that, no sooner had the tawny owls finished with the nest box and moved out, than the stock doves have moved in:

Returning to the meadows, for quite a few years now we have been trying to establish a swift colony here but it has been a very slow process indeed. The good news is that the sole bird in box 3 has now found itself a mate:

There is another pair of birds in box 5, but an egg is yet to be laid in either box. Last year the first egg was laid on 22nd May, so things this year are already over a fortnight behind. This delay will inevitably be putting back when the chicks fledge and they can leave for Africa at the end of the summer. I do hope that both pairs get going soon so that they will be ready to leave with the rest of the swifts, migrating in a group rather than on their own.

We have returned from the Isles of Scilly to find the meadows bathed in a brilliant white. In all the years we have been here, there has never been such a magnificent show of oxeye daisies:

Perhaps some might think that this concentration of these large plants will be swamping other things out, but these are beautiful native plants and are offering up an immense amount of pollen, so it’s difficult to be too cross with them.

We set out to discover what invertebrates are making use of this completely overwhelming number of flowers:

Painted lady butterflies certainly seem to love them. These butterflies are long-distance migrants, starting out from North Africa and the Middle East in the early spring each year. From there they spread across Europe in a multi-generational migration, since each individual only lives a few weeks, and they arrive in Britain from May onwards. In the autumn they start heading south again and return to their starting point, completing a 9,000 mile circuit. Lots of them have arrived in the meadows already and can be seen dancing amongst the daisies:

All sorts of beetle gorge on the vast amount of pollen produced by the flowers:

We also saw swollen-thighed beetles (Oedemera nobilis), malachite beetles (Malachius bipustulatus) and lots of tiny beetles that are so minuscule and covered in pollen that I feel I have no chance of identifying them:

But what we will remember most about this enjoyable search amongst the daisies are the spiders. The common crab spider, Xysticus cristata, is an ambush predator that waits for something to land on the flower and then pounces on it.

It was only when I loaded this photo onto my computer and had a proper look at it that I saw that her prey was another spider. In fact, it is actually a male of the same species that she is eating:

I don’t know whether he had just mated with her and no longer served any purpose other than as a meal, or perhaps he had tried to court her but she wasn’t impressed. Either way it did not end well for him. This spring I have been trying to understand spiders a bit more so that I can get to like them, but they don’t do themselves any favours with this sort of behaviour.

This is another spider that lies in wait for visitors to the flower. She stays stock still with her long legs spread out and ready for immediate action:

Below is the male of the species, smaller and with brown markings but with the same really long first pair of legs:

I had never seen this next spider before but I knew what it was the instant I spotted it. It’s the cricket bat spider (Mangora acalypha):

I really enjoyed this week’s oxeye daisy project, although I now have the yellow and white flowers imprinted on my retinas.

It was pleasing to get a photo of this furry hoverfly in the meadows this week. He’s trying really hard to look like a white-tailed bumblebee, but he plopped himself down onto this leaf in a most un-bee like manner which is what caught my attention. He also has big fly-eyes, only a single set of wings and short, wispy antennae:

This is the bumblebee mimic hoverfly, Volucella bombylans (var plumata), and he is imitating a stinging white-tailed bumblebee to avoid bird predation. The female hoverfly also uses this disguise to trick her way into a bumblebee nest to lay her eggs, although she will also use social wasp nests. The hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest, as well as occasionally also eating the bee or wasp larvae.

Our precious colony of small blue butterflies has now emerged and there is a lot of kidney vetch around to support them this summer:

Mating small heaths using a daisy as their platform:

The 22-spot ladybird is also very small at only 3-5mm and it eats the mildew on a variety of plants:

While we were away we had an unusual visitor to the meadows:

As the bird flew off the perch, you can also make out its red trousers:

Here is a much better photo of the bird from Wiki Commons:

This bird will probably have migrated back to the UK along with the swifts, using them as a mobile larder. Now that it has arrived back in the UK, it will switch from eating swifts to acrobatically catching dragonflies midair in its claws.

I am pleased to say that the three swifts that we were expecting back have avoided the attentions of the hobby and all have arrived in their boxes.

I have numbered to boxes that we now have up on the side of the house in the photo below:

Box 3 is the most successful with four young swifts fledging from it over the last couple of years. But last summer there was unfortunately only a single parent bringing them up. This bird arrived back in the box on 8th May this year:

Having arrived, the swift then disappeared for a few days, returned for a night, went off for another few days and then, overnight on on 20th May, there were two of them:

But my celebration was short lived because that was just for one night. We are now back to there being just one swift in the box each night. The bird has removed all the old bedding and the box is now bare. Some of the ejected nest material has got caught on spider webbing in front of the camera and created the white splodge.

There wasn’t a camera in box 5 last year but we know that the pair of swifts had claimed it and were roosting in there every night. Over the winter, when the birds were away, Dave installed a camera in the box and we can now see that both birds have successfully returned:

The hobby timed its arrival perfectly because dragonflies are now emerging from the ponds:

There are also lots of damselflies around the ponds but I shouldn’t imagine a hobby would bother with these:

It has been so very dry which are difficult conditions for the badgers who are trying to eat worms. Nevertheless, they are doing what they can.

A little foraging group out and about, cub leading the way:

The remains of a bumblebee nest that they dug out one night to get at the grubs:

Over in the wood, the owl excitement is over for another year and all four tawny owl chicks fledged on 11th May. Earlier on that day, the adult seemed to be encouraging them out of the box:

Then, at around 4pm, one of the chicks launched itself from the box and can be seen in the bottom right below:

Most unfortunately, the main camera looking at the box wasn’t in quite the right position and this is the best it managed of this exciting event:

Again around 4pm, another of the chicks scrabbled up the tree. It would have then hidden itself further up while the parents continued to bring it food.

But after 4pm on 11th there has been minimal activity at the box, indicating that all the chicks left around the same time. So that’s it for another year, but I do so hope they choose to nest there again next year.

We were very pleased with how many tadpoles were wriggling around in the pond in the marjoram clearing. However, we weren’t the only ones to notice them. Unfortunately a pair of crows have systematically fished them all out and we can no longer see any at all.

I finish today with a little group of four great tits that I presume have recently fledged. John the bird ringer has been on a mission this spring to ring all the baby blue tits and great tits that are being raised in the bird and dormice boxes. This project has just finished with a total of 117 blue tit and 20 great tit chicks being ringed.

When he puts his nets up later in the year it will be really interesting to see what percentage of the tits being caught fledged from the boxes this spring.